(Phys.org) —Physicists in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University have made several important discoveries regarding the basic structure of mesons—subatomic particles long thought to be composed of one ...

Since the beginning of time, human beings have sought to understand what the universe and everything within it is made up of. And while ancient magi and philosophers conceived of a world composed of four or five elements ...

(Phys.org) -- Research into quantum bits (qubits) for use in a quantum computer has become tied to entanglement, the still mysterious phenomenon whereby subatomic particles exist in an entangled state such that any change ...

(Phys.org) —UC Santa Barbara physicist Tarun Grover has provided definitive mathematical evidence for supersymmetry in a condensed matter system. Sought after in the realm of subatomic particles by physicists for several ...

Accelerating subatomic particles to almost the speed of light and then crashing them together reveals much about the nature of the matter. Nuclear physicists need to fully understand these complex collisions if they are to ...

Dark matter... It came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang. Within its confines, galaxies formed and evolved. If you add up all the parts contained within any given galaxy you derive its mass, yet its gravitational ...

Today CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced the most conclusive evidence yet for the existence of the Higgs boson (at 5 sigma), a long-elusive cornerstone of the Standard Model of physics. This subatomic ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- The constellation Cygnus, now visible in the western sky as twilight deepens after sunset, hosts one of our galaxy's richest-known stellar construction zones. Astronomers viewing the region at visible wavelengths ...

Beginning Sunday, September 18, 2011 at NASA's launch facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, space scientists from the University of New Hampshire will attempt to send a balloon up to 130,000 feet with a one-ton instrument ...

Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher near Geneva have announced the discovery of a new subatomic particle that looks remarkably like the long-sought Higgs boson. Sometimes called the "God particle" because ...

Subatomic particle

In physics, subatomic particles are the particles composing nucleons and atoms. There are two types of subatomic particles: elementary particles, which are not made of other particles, and composite particles. Particle physics and nuclear physics study these particles and how they interact.

Elementary particles of the Standard Model include:

Composite subatomic particles (such as protons or atomic nuclei) are bound states of two or more elementary particles. For example, a proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark, while the atomic nuclei of helium-4 is composed of two protons and two neutrons. Composite particles include all hadrons. These, in turn, are composed of baryons (e.g., protons and neutrons) and mesons (e.g., pions and kaons).

There are hundreds of known subatomic particles. Most are either the result of cosmic rays interacting with matter, or have been produced by scattering processes in particle accelerators.[citation needed]